


After The Battle

by tanks4thememory



Category: Tron (1982), Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen, Tron Female Character Ficathon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-01
Updated: 2013-02-01
Packaged: 2017-11-27 20:11:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/665978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanks4thememory/pseuds/tanks4thememory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The MCP is derezzed, Flynn has been safely returned to the User world, and the system is free! ...Now what?</p>
            </blockquote>





	After The Battle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DawningStar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DawningStar/gifts).



> Dawn prompted: "After the MCP's fall, Yori helps hold the divided system together until there's time for new orders from the Users."
> 
> Hope you like the result! :)

“Video warriors, look at the I/O Towers!”, Dumont said, drawing their attention to the inhabited sectors on the horizon. “Every tower is lighting up!” A murmur of joy and relief ran through the gathered group of Tower Guardians as the beams shifted from dull red to bright blue, piercing and gradually burning away the pall that had filled the system’s sky ever since the MCP had taken over, blocking out both the light of the stars and the ability of most programs to contact their Users.

Yori couldn’t help but grin as well, letting the thrill of the moment warm her circuits, leaning into Tron’s hold and returning his pings of ~ _/joy-relief-love_ ~. It was finally over. Against all odds, they had won, and the system was free again.

Gradually, though, the question of what they were supposed to do now intruded onto her thoughts. She didn’t know about the others, but during all the time spent laboring under the eyes of the MCP’s guards, energy drain rendering her a pale shadow of her former self, and then later in the frantic escape and attempts to aid Tron in his quest, there had been little room for considerations of ‘after’ in her processes. She, like everyone else, had been too focused on the now, on just surviving another microcycle. Anything else had been too much to hope for.

The most immediate concern that presented itself was the question of transportation. They needed to reach an inhabited sector, and soon. She had no doubt that the Users would set things to rights eventually, now that contact had been restored, but that would take time. Meanwhile, the remains of the MCP’s forces would be confused and leaderless, and the programs coming out of their low-energy induced stupors would be lost and frightened. With no one to direct them, there would be confusion, turmoil, and likely violence, and the system had seen enough deresolution for awhile.

“We need to find some kind of transport,” Yori said. “We can’t just keep standing around here like a bunch of null-bits. Programs will need to know what‘s happened, and in order to tell them we need to get somewhere that has broadcast equipment. Not to mention, the Guardians need to get back to their towers if proper contact with the Users is going to be reestablished.”

Tron glanced down at her, then nodded, his eyes narrowing slightly and his mouth becoming a thin line, the way it always did when he was processing something seriously. “And there are programs on the Game Grid that still need to be freed,” Tron added. “But you’re right; we’ll need transport before anything else.” He glanced around. With both the solar sailer and Sark’s command carrier gone, their options were rather limited, to say the least.

“Looks like our only option in Sark’s shuttle pod,” Tron said, pointing out the boxy little craft still resting in its docking ports a little ways across the mesa. “It doesn’t have that great a range, but it should be able to get us to the nearest inhabited sector. Assuming we can get it flying, that is.”

“Leave that to me,” Yori said. “If I can steer a half-derezzed carrier, this shouldn’t be a problem.” Tron nodded. “Right then,” he said. “Let’s move.” Then, gesturing for the Tower Guardians to follow, they headed down the mesa to the waiting shuttle pod.

************************************

In the end, getting the boxy craft off the ground again had proved to be the easy part. Steering it, however, was harder than piloting a damaged recognizer. By the time she’d managed to get the little shuttle on a somewhat stable flight pattern, Yori was planning to find whoever had designed it and beat them over the head with her data tablet. Really, without some form of outside control to stabilize it, the shuttle was about as flyable as the cargo containers it resembled.

By the time they’d finally set down, just outside one of the central system sectors (the shuttle hadn’t *quite* been able to make it to the actual landing platform), she was not only determined to find and smack its designer, but to design something better herself. There _had_ to be some more stable configuration that could be concocted for small, free-flying aircraft than _this_.

Still, it had done it its job, and they only had a short walk from their landing site to the inhabited sector. Barely had they reached the actual central computer district, though, when they were surrounded by a group of data pushers bombarding them with questions and pings ranging from curious to almost frantic. This sector had been under the MCP’s control the longest, and many of the programs there no longer even knew who they were supposed to report to.

Fortunately, Algol, one of the Guardians, took charge of the confused programs and bid them follow him to the I/O Tower in the city’s center. Of all the remaining Guardians, he was the oldest, and was best equipped to reacquaint the programs of this sector with their Users, until a new Guardian could be installed. Bidding Yori, Tron, and his fellow Guardians farewell, he led the data pushers away so that the others could get back to the task at hand, the programs flitting and clustering about him like nervous bits.

It saddened Yori to see programs so lost, but she knew that they were in good hands. She and Tron had to make certain that the word was spread, the other Guardians returned to their posts, and the system brought back to order. And for that, they first needed a broadcast tower.

Finding said broadcast tower was easy enough; it rivaled an I/O Tower in height, after all. Getting into it, however, had required Tron to… persuade the memory guards at the entrance, after informing them of the change in system management. They would live, though both would be nursing severe processor aches once they came around from the installation of Tron’s emergency override protocols. With Sark gone, they were forced to recognize Tron as the new Security Command Program; it was crude, but it would hold until they could be properly bug checked and restored to their proper functions by the Users.

Fortunately the programs within were much more cooperative, if just as confused as the data pushers outside had been. Yori directed them to Algol at the I/O Tower, thus serving a dual purpose of getting them out from underfoot and setting them back on the path to proper functioning.

The room safely cleared except for herself, Tron, and the Guardians, Yori sighed, leaning up to press her lips against Tron’s again in the strange but pleasant gesture Flynn had showed her in the last moments before his seemingly suicidal leap into the MCP‘s beam. She still had no idea what it was about, other than being a gesture of affection, but in the unlikely event she ever saw Flynn again, she’d have to ask him. As Tron had said, it was nice, more than _nice_ , in fact, but she’d like to have a name for it. “You’d better get going,” she said. Loathe as she was to part from him so soon after their reunion, they both had their own tasks to do. “Dumont and I can handle things here for now; you need to make sure the other Guardians get back to their Towers.”

Tron nodded, but was equally reluctant to part, and gave her another quick lip-pressing gesture, reaching up to lightly brush his hand over the back of her worker’s cap, as if trying to run his fingers through her hair. ~ _Beautiful…_ ~, he murmured in binary, his intentions coming across loud and clear in that simple word.

Yori laughed softly, giving him a playful shove on his way. ~ _/later_ ~, she pinged back firmly, though still obviously amused, causing Tron to break out into one of those broad, bright smiles that made his beta-hood all the more apparent and rub the back of his helmet sheepishly. They had to remember that they had a ‘later’ now.

“Right,” he said, trying to become serious again, becoming aware that several of the Tower Guardians, including Dumont, were watching him with fond amusement. “Later.” Tron gestured to the Guardians, and they followed him back out, heading for the landing platform to commandeer a recognizer or solar sailer with which to transport the Guardians back to their home sectors.

Yori watched him go, then turned to the broadcasting equipment, relieved to see that it was much more intuitive than the shuttle’s awful controls had been. She began quickly composing a binary message containing the relevant details of the MCP’s downfall, and the fact that the system was now back under the control of the Users. It also instructed programs to report to their nearest I/O Tower for further instructions, as their Guardians would be returning as soon as possible. After Dumont had double checked it (grumbling good-naturedly about how crude an interface it was compared to his control pod back home), the transmission was broadcast, soon to reach every corner of Encom 511.

Message sent, Yori leaned against the console, taking a moment to just breathe, smiling faintly as Dumont came over to wrap a supportive arm around her shoulders. She didn’t doubt that there was still much work ahead of them all. But now, gazing out the broadcast tower’s window, looking out over the sector that was once again bright, thriving, and _alive_ , there was no doubt in her processor that they would be able to do it. Together.

The MCP was dead. Long live the Users.


End file.
